I can’t tell if the_dude is a gimmick account or not. He’s only made a few posts, and while they’ve been awful, there hasn’t been anything that outright says he’s a joke. In playing Xeon, I had a very hard time deciding whether I was playing an intentionally bad game or not, because I didn’t think anyone could make anything this bad. I’m writing this review under the assumption that this game was not made as a joke.

-Disclaimer- I didn’t finish this game legitimately, and anyone who can has the patience of a saint. I played enough of it to know that it’s amazingly bad, and to know that the author himself never played it. He just... couldn’t have.

Graphics

The game is a mix of original graphics and tiles ripped from Wandering Hamster. Nearly every walkabout uses the same graphic, which isn’t very good to begin with. The hero’s battle sprite isn’t the worst I’ve ever seen, especially when compared to the game’s maptiles and walkabouts, but it’s still not very good. The stance is awkward, the colors clash badly, and there are two random black dots in the upper left part of the frame.

Enemy graphics are also painfully bland, though they get marginally better as the game goes along. The maptiles range from eye-burning to bland to STOP STEALING FROM WANDERING HAMSTER.

Storyline

To start things off, there’s no exposition of any kind. There’s no intro scene or even a text box to give you some idea why you’re playing. If you take a step and then walk back onto the tile that you start on, you’ll see something that MAY have been intended to be an intro, but it’s just two text boxes that you can only partially read because they were resized and aligned so poorly. After this, you may or may not wander around and find your mother, who sends you off on a fetch quest. It doesn’t matter, the spelling and grammar is so bad that you won’t understand anything that’s said anyway.

Gameplay

The gameplay is among the worst I’ve experienced in any game I’ve ever played, including intentionally bad ones. There isn’t a single good thing to say about it.

Battle

The encounter rate is high, your attacks are weak, and the first enemies can’t do a single point of damage to you. Every attack hits twice, and is animated terribly. You gain almost no experience or gold per battle, and the second enemy types you encounter will beat the hell out of you if you don’t level build. Your speed stat is so low that every battle takes a couple of minutes, even if you only get one move. The battles are unfathomably bad, and I guarantee that the author of this game either used debug keys to get through them or never played the game at all. No one would who played this would think this was ready to be released.

Map Design

The map design is painfully bad as well. There are randomly placed doors that don’t have any graphics to indicate that they lead to another area, and the second area you explore is a forest maze where the walls and floors are so closely colored that looking at them hurts. There are chests that contain no items, and others that screw up other NPCs if opened (There’s a chest in the lower left side of the first screen that deletes a robot NPC if you open it). There’s no reasoning behind the construction of any of these maps, and you’ll encounter some absolutely empty areas.

Balance

Enemies go from totally harmless to fatally dangerous in one step. There are items that do nothing, and some that have descriptions that tell you absolutely nothing. The uselessness of everything in this game is profound.

Music

My computer can’t play music, but I looked in the RPG file, and there’s only one song, taken from the editor.

Enjoyment

I've had more fun with games that were DESIGNED to cause the player pain. That's saying something.

Final Blows

Play your game before releasing it and don't rip graphics.

WELL DONE.

Final Scores

Graphics: 2/10.0

Some ripped, some awful. Not the worst ever, but damn close.

Storyline: 1/10.0

Pointless fetch quests and an intro that doesn't work. There's nothing to see here.